Why? It's the capitalism. Our global economic system is committing ecocide, and there seems to be nothing the vast majority of us can do.
And the damage is not just to our social fabric or our spirituality. If the natural world goes--we go. Capitalism and a wonton disregard for the laws of nature will cause our species to go extinct if we can't stop it. Stop them--the oligarchs and their servants in the political realm.
Annabel The problem isn't capitalism,the problem is multi faceted, put some adjectives in front of capitalism, and I will agree, like unchecked, unregulated, runaway Capitalism.
Were it not for Capitalism none of us would exist, you an I would not be sitting at a computer, reading this blog and typing our comments.
The U.S.A. exists because of a capitalist venture called the London Company of Virginia was formed in 1606, and granted a monopoly charter by James I.
The major problem is sex. Men just have to have sex, and sex leads to reproduction, and reproduction leads to population growth. It took 1400 years for the population to double from 200 million to 400 million, even with the black death and other plagues, by 1400
Then it took another 350 years for it to double to 800 million by 1750
It took another 250 years for it to double to 1.6 billion by 1900
It only took 64 years for it to double to 3.2 billion by 1964
It only took 35 years for it to double to 6.4 billion in 1999
Here it is 2024, and the worlds population is now 8.2 billion., it has grown by 1.8 billion in 24 years The world's population is expected to peak at 10.3 billion by 2080
If we live that long. The problem is that there are too many mouths and minds demanding resources from bread to cell phones and air travel.
Gaia is not a cornucopia. Mineral resources are finite and non renewable, renewable resources depend on arable land, water, even breathable air all of which we take for granted.
The Atlantic gyre is de salinating, the arctic ice is gone in summer, the albedo effect is warming the ocean and disrupting the jet stream and winters are getting worse, heat domes are appearing and staying longer, hurricanes and cyclones are coming earlier, stronger and more frequent, tornadoes are being created in numers never seen before, insects, particularly pollinators are disappearing.
And the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere has passed the tipping point of 350 ppm, and is not reversible even if we develop carbon capture technology for the atmosphere.
There will be some of our species that makes it through, there always is, usually those that live in mountains
Mr. Farrar, we have tried "regulated capitalism" for the last two centuries. And this is what it has given us. Economic depression every seven years on average. Poisoning of the biosphere. The greatest inequality in history. The privately owned business community on the verge of exceeding the power of governments. The two most destructive wars in history, both during one lifetime. Constant war all over the globe. And you think male sex drive is the problem. This is a gross oversimplification of our complicated world-wide problem.
Your many words about the "doubling" of world population is best described by the equation for the growth of compound interest. I would include it here, but the computer will not permit such mathematical notation. So you can find it in any elementary college algebra textbook. I taught it for years in my Population course. You might be interested to know that the entire world population is already in the second phase of the Demographic Transition which some Demographers have been predicting since the 1930s. The male sex drive is one part of the issue, as is the female sex drive, but sex drive alone is a gross and incorrect, typical biological-reductionist, explanation.
We haven't tried a maximum wage on the rich yet, or small limits on campaign contributions yet. There really is not much regulation of unlimited greed in America?
Capitalism has become a catch all phrase, depending on one's ideological predisposition it means many things. But without the incentive to invest your time and energy, which inevitably translates as a medium of exchange, money, aka capitalism, we are reduced to the live of a medieval serf., and frankly the water and air were more fetid and putrid then.
One can use any mathematical formula one wishes, and invoke any ism or ist they wish, such as reductionist. Which is an incorrect use of a word, as ism or ist means adherence to an idea to the exclusion of all others. I don't hold such ideas, but in truth the human sex drive, is why we copulate, and what is the product of copulation? Babies, and babies grown up to be humans (obnoxious ones at that)
So tell Mr Dobbertin, what other cause is there for the geometric expansion of the world's population, besides copulation? Pathenogenesis? Maybe in the primodial past, after all at one time there were no genders, that is why men have nipples, and why the Y Chromosome is not really a Y but a truncated X, with one leg of the X snipped by some segments.
Rather than dispute me, Mr Dobbertin how about venturing your own explanations and ideas. Do so in your own words, please, not by referring me to a book.
Mr. Farrar, please believe me when I say there is not enough room here, nor do I have the time to venture my own explanations here. I am, like you, elderly. I currently have several projects in the works and time is not my friend. I hope to finish my writing before I die. If I do not, my daughter will undoubtedly finish for me. She attended Columbia on scholarship and graduated with honors. She is a lot smarter than I. She delivered her first child, got married, finished her doctorate in Law and passed the bar Exam, all in one Summer.
I do not have the time or energy to lay out my ideas in full here. And even if I did attempt it I do not think Mr. Hartmann and his many faithful followers would be happy about it. This is his blog not mine.
I understand Mr Dobbertin. I don't think a long drawn out explanation is needed, any ideas can be encapsulated in a paragraph.
My brief is against the anti capitalists. Capitalism is used like communism is used on the right, as a stand in for evil, or the devil.
This is simplistic thinking. You are in general correct, that the situation that exists, the environmental disaster, even the oppression is a consequence, of "regulated" capitalism.
The problem is that it really isn't regulated. there is the appearance of regulation. The ability to regulate has degenerated over time, thanks to regulatory capture and politics. And that problem exists because of money in politics, and that problem exists because of human nature.
The ideal is a self effacing, selfless, self sacrificing savior a Messiah in Hudaism, a Jesus in Christianity and a Mahdi in Islam.
I am not at all content with the status quo, or the alternatives that have been tried, and humans have tried every alternative possible. From the rule of wise men (elite) aka Republic, to Emperors and Kings, to strongmen regimes (authoritarian) even co ops of a sort)the USSR and the PRC were initially set up as a co op, rule by committee, but that didn't last long before a strongman appeared and took control.
Representative government, aka Democracy,is the best alternative tried so far, but the problem is how to keep it free of corruption.
A regulated market economy (not a free market economy) has elevated me,you and the common man and woman, to a standard of living that would have been envied by Kings of old. I am middle middle class, and live better than Henry VIII., as do our lower middle class. even the lower classes.
The alternative is to live the life of a pseudo slave, under the thumb and boot of a diktat or the uncertainty or insecurity of anarchy or as a human resource of the ruling class. much as in the day of kings, barons and dukes.
Which in truth is the way we appear to be headed, a ruling class without the titles,pomp and circumstance of the nobility of old.
The Tidewater Aristocracy, the planter class of Virginia and the Carolinas enjoined the revolution, not because of the monopoly accorded the East India Company, and the taxes levied or the restrictions on manufacture, but because they had envisioned that they would be the nobility, with all of the titles, pomp and circumstance.
However the common man, the merchant, the farmer, the tradesman,had no truck with the idea of replacing British overlords with home grown overlords, so to get them on board, they resulted to forming Committees of Public Safety, name chosen so as not to alarm the British overlords and whose purpose was to monitor and punish those with loyalst sympathies, that was not enough so they had the printing presses in Philadelphia (Ben Franklins and Rittenhouse) publish tracts like Common Sense and Rights of Man, which worked, all too well, as the common man was in no mood to accept a new ruling class, but ruling class they became anyway, instead of titles, nobles, guilded carriages,they erected palatial homes (plantations), out of sight of the people, up mile long tree lined driveways, feted, entertained and married within their class, while retaining political control, via elections, of the instrument of power, the government.
They called themselves the First Families of Virginia and 12 of our presidents have come from the FFV. These families and the merchant families in the north have produced the shakers and movers,presidents and politicians. families like the Randolph's in Virginia ( William Randolph Hearst), the Van derBilts, the Adams, the Roosevelts (Dutch for Rose field), 17th century settlers,old money, in New Amsterdam.
Interestingly the Presidents and Politicians of substance, like Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and Roosevelts seem to have presided in the interests of the nation, and thus the people, as a whole. Whereas those of mean origins, like Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton, not so much
Iwould like to include Grant as an exception, because of the 15th Amendment, but his first act as President was to authorize the redemption of Lincolns War Bonds for Gold, his second act was to sign legislation that demonitized silver which produce the Grant signed the Coinage Act of 1873, effectively ending the legal basis for bimetallism. The Coinage Act discontinued the standard silver dollar and established the gold dollar as the monetary standard; because the gold supply did not increase as quickly as the population, the result was deflation. Silverites, who wanted more money in circulation to raise the prices farmers received, denounced the move as the "Crime of 1873", claiming deflation made debts more burdensome for farmers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant
My point is that capitalism and democracy have been a mixed bag of good and evil.
The alternative is authoritarianism. Which as we have discovered in the 20th and 21st Century can arrive via the ballot box.
As regards Capitalism is is not a political ideology, but an economic idea and it exists and thrives in any political environment.The capital employed by the USSR was human labor and mental effort. The capital employed in the west is a medium of exchange produced, sans coercion and diktat,by human labor and mental effort.
For those inclined toward the ideal of an eqalitarian society, there is no such thing, never has been, never can be. There will always be a MFWIC claiming the major share of resources. and demanding obedience. Be the Kingdom be the family, a group a tribe or a nation.
The gist of which is: That’s the point. Thiel and Vance — along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement — believe that the only way true libertarians can win in America is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the American establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.
Yarvin comes as close as anyone to being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement. He has written that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.
In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful; they should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.
Does this form of government, Libertarian, have appeal?
BTW, that is exactly how the Joint Venture known as the London Company of Virginia was governed from 1607 to 1624, when the charter was revoked and Virginia made a royal colony.
Mr. Farrar, Yarvin is wrong and does not understand what power is. It most certainly is not held by an amalgam of universities and mainstream press. It is held by the military-industrial-financial complex. Let's be honest; without the military, there is no real power.
Yarvin is a type I have seen many times in my academic career. They attend college, find it to be somewhat liberal in its orientation, which most are. That is, colleges are places where one is encouraged to be open to new, varied ideas. For reasons of their own, these people do not fit in at college and believe that there is a kind of power there which is inimical to them.
Thanks for the Robert Reich article.
As for the major theme: I hope you are correct and what we need is more effective regulation of the capitalist system. FDR demonstrated that it is a possible solution.
I did not realize that 12 of our presidents came from the Virginia planter elite. It does seem odd that our presidents who were most effective at acting for the benefit of all of us were from the elite like Jefferson and the Roosevelts and Kennedy, if he had lived longer. [I will always believe that JFK was killed by the Pentagon, so they could get their war] while those who were the base servants of the rich were common folk like Nixon, Truman, Reagan, Cleveland, Clinton.
It is hard to know how to classify the Bushes in this regard. Were they base and evil or just incompetent? Baby Bush was possibly both. I think he bungled 911. I do not believe he was in on a clandestine, conspiratorial part of the plot. But I believe he knew something was coming and he almost welcomed it. All the intelligence agencies informed him that something big was in the pipeline; but he went on vacation in Florida.
Oh women need and want it, that is for sure, my sister started masturbating when she was 8 with a pillow.
But women raping men is rare, and men can't believe that a man can be raped by a woman, because he has to erect to penetrate, unless she straps on a dildo.
Rape is universally a crime by men on women, not vice versa. So the male sex drive is more powerful than the female.
I will state this, power is one hell of an aphrodisiac, for men and women, power floods the system with testosterone (progesterone in females), and sexual abuse is not a male only preoccupation.
I know a woman who was sexually abused (fingered) by her grandmother.
I used to think religious extremists with nuclear bombs, such as Iran, would end humanity. Now it seems man will do it without the need of nuclear disaster. The end of insects, birds, etc is the end of the food supply. Man’s extreme stupidity and shortsightedness will be the end of him. “Not with a bang but a whimper”.
Ms. Maloney. I never was good with poetry. Is The Hollow Men part of the Waste Land? I remember having a darned hard time with T.S. Eliot. The only references in it which I recognized were Shakespeare [a hobby of mine since I was an undergrad] and Ovid, obviously, as so much of Shakespeare's muse was Ovid.
It's a sequel. I just looked it up (lol). It's been 50 years since I studied T.S. Eliot. I do remember The Hollow Men, as it seemed to relate to the Vietnam War at the time.
The corporate “system “ is against us making large inroads to mitigate more climate damage. Would I like to have a hybrid vehicle? Sure but I am trying not to have a car payment in my senior years. Public transportation is limited in areas where I live (SCAL mountains) and takes forever to get anywhere right now after wildfires damaged roads and traffic is funneled through one major highway. My family and I recently returned from evacuation from a wildfire that threatened our neighborhood and came close to wiping out our town. It’s currently threatening the next town over from us, a major resort town. Even though this fire was determined to be arson, the fact that California’s drought situation has made it extremely dangerous. We are all praying for winter, except oh wait! We might have a repeat of Snowmaggedon like we did in winter 2023 buried in 12 feet of snow. So it’s getting pretty difficult choosing where to live anymore- the valley with 110 degrees or desert with 115 degrees or mountains with wildfires and unpredictable winter storms. We are all at risk now and I can’t even imagine the horror of the hurricane effect on lives and property back east. So I do what I can recycling and try to pay attention to corporate excess but in some ways I feel helpless in the struggle for corporate control over our systems of finance, government and the complacency of so many fellow citizens.
Ms. Tankersley, I appreciate your dilemma and sympathize with you and your neighbors. I have former students and friends in the South East who are now in dire straights from Helene. I believe you are on the right track. Corporatism is the place to look for an explanation of the problem.
Oldsalt65, yes, the last passenger pigeons lived in the area around Traverse City, Michigan. They were snared and killed by the millions in immense nets which were strung up onto trees in the area. I have seen old photos from a century ago of the nets full of birds. The photos hang on the walls of a hospital in Petoskey, Michigan which is a short hop up the road from Traverse City. The extinction of a species has been turned into a form of Bourgeois art.
The politicians won't. That only leaves us, and it's a tall order. At some point we will have to rise up on a global scale. I have no idea how this will play out, and I have been thinking about it for a number of decades.
I may well be gone by the time the wheels really fall off. But just in case I am not--I am building a sort of urban haven in an inner city, the one that was most safe from the climate crash and still affordable. I am 68 now. We will see how it goes.
As to the politicians and leaders--some are aware and are doing all they can. But that is a limited set. The capitalist power has so thoroughly invaded the body politic that getting the parasite out will severely damage the host.
Do you notice the walls that well-meaning and well-informed leaders run up against when they try to effect real change?
And that is just in this country. Globally, the type of change we need is a virtually impossible within the current system.
We are faced with a dilemma Annabel. The anti capitalist, or Marxist ideal, is two class society, as in the old Communist countries, a ruling class and serfs.
Runaway unregulated capitalism leads to the Marxist ideal.
The reason we have prospered, the reason that you can sit at your computer in a comfortable home,on a comfortable chair, in a warmed house, with a full belly is because of regulated controlled capitalism.
Human nature, humans, tend towards excess, insatiable appetites for things, food and power.
The idea behind democracy is to hold in check the strive for power. To obtain power requires use of force or persuasion or both. Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, Jenghis Khan, the minions of Muhammad, used force to obtain power, and the basis of the force was persuasion and force. Start small and build large.
Mussolini, Hitler, Franco the Bolsheviks, Mao started with persuasion then when they had numbers used force.
Christianity started with persuasion, apostles proselytizing in the markets, then when it had enough numbers to be troublesome, emperor Constantine co opted the movement and then used force to bring it and the people to heel.
Judaism and Islam started as persuasion, then imposed by force.
Moses had is brother Aaron gather a band of cutthroats and cut the throats of half of he tribe at night, in their tents, because they rejected him and contiuned worshiping Ba'al.
Muhammad accumulated followers, in large part because he was a successful caravan raider, and after he died his successor spread out through the Mideast, subjugating the Christians, Jews, pagans and Zorastrians with the sword.
Capitalism is simply a tool, one of many, an ideology that is the means for power, and power is control over people and their minds.
Ms. Maloney, I am not sure as to what you are asking. So, let me at least respond with this: petitio principii, means reasoning in a circle. A tautology is a thing defined in terms of itself; or, another kind of circularity. I may be a bit off the mark here. But I believe you may find both in Mr. Farrar's presentation.
Hey North Carolina, that's you too! If your state and federal reps continue to not do anything about it, your citizens could begin to take this on. But you do not have the citizen initiative ability, and your Republican reps are not going to give it to you.
So, I think it is very worthy for Congress to pass a law to grant All States this power of Citizen Initiatives. Put some effective guardrails and rules on it to keep it from being exploited by big money and foreign actors.
Some states where citizens already have this power have approved initiatives to ban gerrymandering and redrawing districts by an independent commission, and even a few Red States are bringing back legal abortion after SCOTUS demolished Roe v. Wade. Consider that SCOTUS has taken their wrecking ball to Voting Rights, and so could a Republican Congress. Citizens in every state should have the right to secured, safe voting rights, and I believe the people in many states would be more likely to secure these rights for themselves than would their state and federal reps.
I'm certain conservatives and Republicans would scream "unconstitutional" at that, and at this:
While they are at it, or when it could pass, Congress should/could include clauses carefully designed to allow the citizens to approve Constitutional amendments where the prescribed "State Legislatures (especially with their gerrymandered, extremist hacks )" refuse to approve them. If designed effectively, citizen initiatives could supplant or command their legislature on Constitutional amendments. ... Something worth thinking about, IMHO, as we look further down the road at the removing Electoral College and renovating the Senate.
I posted this on my sub-stack some time ago. Right now we are performing our ghost dance and convincing ourselves that we can escape our predicament. We can't, it's too late unless we make drastic changes which we probably won't.
Humans are at the top of the food chain---FOR NOW.
We can and will invent our way out of burning things to create the energy that keeps us alive and makes life worth living.
Ignorance and the belief that all this destruction is not our fault or the thought that it is some god's will has to be conquered.
If you have a conscience, what a horror to realize and watch what is being destroyed. It's lead, follow, or get out of the way. Can we afford conservatives or psychopaths running things? Hell no!
Vote like the planet depends on it, because it does.
Alis, Your reference to energy brings to my mind three things:
1) During our entire time on this planet human kind has always devised ways to produce more energy per capita than the previous generations. Never does this process work in the reverse direction. Never. We can thank Leslie White and Beth Dillingham when they were at the university of Michigan for pointing out this insight. I was lucky enough to study under Beth and her husband Harry Dillingham, two brilliant teachers. You can read in one sitting, White and Dillingham's short book: THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE, 1973, Burgess Publishing.
For thousands of years the natural movement of water and wind was harnessed in the form of water wheels and windmills. Also, the muscular strength of animals and Humans was used to move things.
For hundreds of years we used the attraction of molecules to combine in ways that released energy which we could put to use for our benefit. Burn wood, burn coal, burn petroleum, burn natural gas, etc. Newcomen and Watt figured out ways to combine levers and the wheel with this burning in such a way as to produce a great deal of useful energy: steam engines, external combustion engines.
A bevy of men all contributed to another form of energy based upon the attractive force of electrons and magnetic fields: electricity. Benjamin Franklin, Nicola Tesla, John Proteus Steinmetz, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse.
Rudolf diesel invented a machine which utilized the potential energy found in the molecular structure of petroleum: Internal combustion engines. Eventually this was modified to another form of internal combustion engine, the gasoline engine.
The modern water wheel which we call the turbine was connected to magnets and copper wires in such a way as to produce a movement of electrons in a wire over great distances. Thus permitting the use of energy to be utilized miles away from the source of the generator of the electricity. Steam power, diesel power, and gasoline power engines also are used to spin the generators which generate the movement of electrons that we call electricity. The best single volume for this topic is: SCIENCE FOR THE CITIZEN, by Lancelot T. Hogben, 1938, Alfred a Knopf.
Eventually mankind found a way to use the energy created by the decaying of matter through the transformation of the nucleus of the atom into another form of nucleus. This released immense amounts of energy undreamed of in previous civilizations.
2) I am describing here, how human kind has learned how to use the three forces in the universe to release energy for human benefit. There are only three forces in the universe.
A) The farthest reaching force is gravity. It can reach out hundreds of millions of light years from distant galaxies to other galaxies. Falling water releases this energy for humankind.
B) The force which attracts the electron to the nucleus of an atom is the middle distance-force. This is the force which combines atoms into molecules and creates magnetic fields of force when the electrons are accelerating on a massive scale. This force combines atoms to create molecules and also moves electrons to generate what we call electricity and magnetism. This is what high school chemistry is about.
C) The third force in the universe is the force which holds the subatomic particles together to form the nucleus of the atom. These are the shortest reaching forces. But they are extremely strong. When the particles in the nucleus of the atom shift their position, this releases immensely intense amounts of energy. The devices mankind has created to shift these particles are called atom bombs, nuclear reactors, cyclotrons, accelerators, etc. The sun is a huge nuclear fusion reactor which has been sending out energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation for 4.5 billion years. All of the energy mankind has used here on Earth has come from two sources. First: Earth's gravity. Or second: it originated in the electromagnetic radiation from the sun which we call light........., until in 1942, when Enrico Fermi released some of this nuclear energy at the University of Chicago. His energy came from uranium here on Earth, not the sun. This was the first time an appreciable amount was released in this fashion. It turned out to be far more than Fermi had expected. Fermi and everyone associated with his "pile" died eventually from radiation or complications from it.
All of this is to demonstrate Leslie White's claim that each generation produces more energy per capita than the pervious one.
3) We can see now that our quest, our irreversible drive to produce more and more humanly useful energy is probably going to cause us to go extinct. Either in a huge atomic blast or in a poisoned environment, if we are not extremely careful.
Please excuse me for this disquisition on energy and extinction. I am certain you follow my reasoning. But try to explain this to MAGATS who are still arguing about how many angels can stand on the head of a pin. Unless we stop this seemingly inexorable drift into hell, our children are doomed.
I have similar ideas about computers, digital information vs. analog information, the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) and life; not just human life, but life itself. These ideas are mostly my own. I did not borrow many of them from others. When I try to explain these ideas to biologists or religious people they get mad as hell at me because I deny both Deism and Darwinism.
Well Dear Dobbertin since I am agnostic on both, you certainly did not piss me off.
There is much truth in the phrase "it is not an exact science". Everything we have learned has been built layer by layer and along the way things had to be sorted and discarded. That tracks with how brains work.
Which leads me to a conclusion I came to after trying to reason with hard right-wing conservatives: their brains do not function like mine---it's absolutely not a matter of intelligence or education. It is about judgement, having a conscience, and being open-minded. Usual discussions with them are on the level of "How's your day going?".
Loved the science progression info. I like Iceland and their Geo-thermal ideas. There are ways to use what is under our feet. It's just further down in some areas, but as they say, we can get there from here. Wind, solar, water/waves, heat storage, choosing less or no children---it is happening.
Whose human minds are you talking about? For some humans, "nothing beats profit," and they're the ones we don't want leading the country or big corporations, including finance and insurance. We are overdue for a major cultural and economic system change in the U.S. It needs to happen before it's too late.
I agree that we are overdue for a major overhaul, but then why are we overdue? Because giving up the comfortable status quo is always a hard sell. We are usually pushed into change by circumstances beyond our control, out of desperation (e.g. the Great Depression creating the impetus for the New Deal). Until the next collapse, people will do capitalism, no matter how soul-killing it is, because it is the proven way to survive. As Bruce says, "sadly true".
That is not true, Jeffrey. Capitalism is not THE proven way to survive, and I don't think we will survive over the long term under this economic system. We are cannibalizing ourselves as we seek to grow continuously in a finite ecosystem.
I agree with you, but you're mistaking what I'm saying. People typically think tactically, not strategically, including you and me. We are reluctant to give up what we have until it's clearly working against our survival, or until something else attainable is clearly better. Long term, we all live in an unsustainable existence under the present rules. We need to change the rules, but most people aren't suffering enough (or at all) yet to pay attention to our pleas.
Jeffry, see my posts on this thread about capitalism.
Capitalism is the reason that you have enough disposable income to sit there and type on a computer or cell phone, eat well enough to pontificate and not be scrabbling to survive.
Capitalism is not the problem, nor is the profit motive, the problem is lack of restraint, and in that regard we all are guilty.
The restraint on us is our access to the medium of exchange. The restraint on those with an excess of the medium of exchange is the law. The law which limits their excess and what they can do with that excess, and their response is to use the excess to buy the law, by buying the law makers and the enforcers.
The motto of Law Enforcement is "to serve and Protect" but that is truncated they serve and protect the ruling class, the 10%
Before it reorganized the USAF had Command based on function, like Air Transport command and Strategic Air Command (SAC(. Each command had a motto the motto of SAC was Peace us Our Profession. I knew one of the men who coined that motto,in response to a competition,it was "Maintaining the Peace is Our Profession. it was adjudged that the motto was too long, so they truncated it to Peace is Our Profession., thus To Serve and Protect the Overlords is reduced to Serve and Protect.
Jeffey: Profit is the motivation for getting out of bed in the morning. The primal motivation is to live, that means food, clothing, shelter, once you achieve that, then the motivation is to improve your physical situation and that means profit.
You have an income Jeffrey, therefore you invest your time and energy into producing something that will provide you a profit, that you have excess medium of exchange to procure those things that you need to survive, make you comfortable and happy.
Before food preservation methods, you only ate what you killed and the rest spoiled, if you had excess you could trade it to someone else who needed food.
What we know as commerce commenced in the fertile crescent with the advent of agriculture and the production of more grain than we could eat. People quickly realized that they could sell (barter) excess grain for products made by their neighbors, and thugs realized that if they could dominate the people with threats of violence, then they could force the people to hand over the excess grain to him where he could store and dispense it, and thus profit, and profit became the driving motion for a person to invest their time and muscle energy into producing a profit.
The pursuit of profit is the reason why we can sit here and self righteously pontificate.
What is needed is restraint, and people don't restrain themselves, restraint has to be imposed, and what has been happening is that restraints were imposed, but those who have felt restrained have been discomfited, and have come together, like in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or National Association of Manufacturers, or even Wall Street, and used the power that they have accumulated, by accumulating the medium of exchange, to use the body politic to remove those restraints,
And the culmination of that effort, is the rise of the corporate state, which Mussolini called fascists, and Lenin State Capitalism.
Mr. Farrar, You say "What we know as commerce commenced in the fertile crescent..." telling us that all of the economic activity in the world today ["the culmination of that activity is the rise of the corporate state"] sprang forth in a linear course from the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This is the usual faulty prehistorical and ancient historical account taught in economics courses of business colleges. This stuff is completely ignorant of the work of the three founders of modern social science in Europe: the Germans Karl Marx and Max Weber, and the Frenchman Emile Durkheim. Plus the work of an army of scholars who tread in their footsteps. Nor are purveyors of this false narrative aware of the work of the founders of American Cultural Anthropology: Franz Boas at Columbia and Leslie White at the University of Michigan. Plus the empirical work of thousands scholars who followed them. Furthermore, the more recent empirical work of Graeber and Wengrow throw out the whole narrative in their recent book: THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING. Look also in DEBT: THE FIRST 5000 YEARS by Graeber.
Cultural Anthropology is in the midst of an intellectual revolution, and old explanations are dying like flies. Our grandchildren's texts will be rewritten as their enquiring minds uncover new paradigms which have been clouded in the past.
Another answer to why might be our preoccupation with electronics, cell phones and even our appliances that now "communicate" wirelessly; being surrounded constantly by things that are destructive to our living world.
By substituting radiation for wires, we are swimming in an ocean of artificial electromagnetic fields that are interfering with life itself. We are in effect electrocuting ourselves, our children, our pets, the insects, birds, animals, trees and plants around us and all of living creation. We are killing our planet.
The Essene Book of Revelation...the Revelation to John the Apostle....regarded by many as the most mystical of the biblical prophecies....John asks to be taken from his time, ahead of our time, and allowed to see our probable future...through graphic detail, John describes his vision of chaos, death, terror, and destruction, the magnitude of which had never been see before. He ask his angelic guide why these things are happening, and the angel replies. "Man has created these powers of destruction. He has wrought them from his own mind. He has turned his face away from the Angels (forces) of the Heavenly Father and the Earthly Mother, and he has fashioned his own destruction."
Upon witnessing this outcome, John's heart is "heavy with compassion." He ask. "Is there no hope?" The voice replies to John echoing a memory of the greatest possibilities for today and future generations. "There is always hope, O thou for whom heaven and earth were created..."
Suddenly the vision of death and destruction fades from view and he is shown another scenario, a second possibility. "But I saw not what befell them, my vision changed, and I saw a new heaven and a new Earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away...And I heard a great voice...saying, there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain."
As John's vision continues he sees a time when peace and cooperation envelop the nations of the world. During this time there is no longer a need for war...."Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore, for the former things are passed away.
Quotes from The Isaiah Effect by Gregg Braden pp. 74-75...Have a Good Day.
About 2 years ago I felt compelled to evacuate from the the Cedar Creek fire in eastern Lane County, Oregon. At the time I had and old cat and an old German shepherd. It was a mismanaged fire, though the report issued said otherwise.
Since that fire, I've subscribed to Wildfire Today. I do recommend that everyone interested in the future of our wild lands and those who fight those wildfires read this also. It's unimaginable what the fire fighters are enduring! Period! No amount of "raking" the forest will resolve the complex challenge.
I still have the old cat and old German shepherd and 2 new kittens that I found in parking lots. And I've decided that I'm not gonna evacuate again till I see the flames.
The USFS has to be funded, The NPS (Nat'l Park Service) has to be funded. This year, Oregon used the entirety of its wildfire funds. Over one million acres of Oregon burned! Eastern Oregon was decimated. And where I live, the AQI is around 150-200 today. Nonetheless, children in this small village are out on bikes and playing. For crying out loud! WTF?
There is one person who will support the USFS; that they don't get counterfeit supplies and have adequate wages: That States, e.g., Oregon, CA, WA, COL, WY, etc., get the support they need.
And did I mention Hurricane Hellene?
During the Cold War, presidential elections were kinda simple; foreign affairs are much easier than domestic affairs. This year, not so much. Nonetheless, the choice is simple, in my humble opinion. It really doesn't matter that the person is plaid, polkadot, s/he... One person, like Biden, FDR, RFK, LBJ, cares deeply about each individual and their rights, and one does not. One person speaks truth and one does not. One person can make a difference. That can be you with your vote.
The planet has been begging for some time now at least 30-50 years. We just didn't notice the signs. We're so numb to it all we cannot even get out of our own way. The only way out now is a turn around world. We need to recoil, pull back radically from the growth model that greed has propelled many of us and even unknowingly. As industrialized creatures We're unable to tolerate even the slightest discomfort.
Thom it is coming soon to all, all of us. Simplicity, survival for the mere basics. My question is:
What the hell difference is it gonna make, even if Kamala becomes next president. Is there anyone here that thinks she wil face -off with the Demogogs of the Democratic machinery and say we are no longer going down this road of endless spiralling costs.
Why? It's the capitalism. Our global economic system is committing ecocide, and there seems to be nothing the vast majority of us can do.
And the damage is not just to our social fabric or our spirituality. If the natural world goes--we go. Capitalism and a wonton disregard for the laws of nature will cause our species to go extinct if we can't stop it. Stop them--the oligarchs and their servants in the political realm.
Annabel The problem isn't capitalism,the problem is multi faceted, put some adjectives in front of capitalism, and I will agree, like unchecked, unregulated, runaway Capitalism.
Were it not for Capitalism none of us would exist, you an I would not be sitting at a computer, reading this blog and typing our comments.
The U.S.A. exists because of a capitalist venture called the London Company of Virginia was formed in 1606, and granted a monopoly charter by James I.
The major problem is sex. Men just have to have sex, and sex leads to reproduction, and reproduction leads to population growth. It took 1400 years for the population to double from 200 million to 400 million, even with the black death and other plagues, by 1400
Then it took another 350 years for it to double to 800 million by 1750
It took another 250 years for it to double to 1.6 billion by 1900
It only took 64 years for it to double to 3.2 billion by 1964
It only took 35 years for it to double to 6.4 billion in 1999
Here it is 2024, and the worlds population is now 8.2 billion., it has grown by 1.8 billion in 24 years The world's population is expected to peak at 10.3 billion by 2080
If we live that long. The problem is that there are too many mouths and minds demanding resources from bread to cell phones and air travel.
Gaia is not a cornucopia. Mineral resources are finite and non renewable, renewable resources depend on arable land, water, even breathable air all of which we take for granted.
The oceans are dying and becoming gyres of plastic, which enter the food chain and wind up even in penis's https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/microplastic-found-in-penis-infertility-sperm-count-erectile-dysfunction#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20study%20found%20that%20microplastics,underwent%20surgery%20for%20erectile%20dysfunction.
The Atlantic gyre is de salinating, the arctic ice is gone in summer, the albedo effect is warming the ocean and disrupting the jet stream and winters are getting worse, heat domes are appearing and staying longer, hurricanes and cyclones are coming earlier, stronger and more frequent, tornadoes are being created in numers never seen before, insects, particularly pollinators are disappearing.
And the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere has passed the tipping point of 350 ppm, and is not reversible even if we develop carbon capture technology for the atmosphere.
There will be some of our species that makes it through, there always is, usually those that live in mountains
Then it took another
Mr. Farrar, we have tried "regulated capitalism" for the last two centuries. And this is what it has given us. Economic depression every seven years on average. Poisoning of the biosphere. The greatest inequality in history. The privately owned business community on the verge of exceeding the power of governments. The two most destructive wars in history, both during one lifetime. Constant war all over the globe. And you think male sex drive is the problem. This is a gross oversimplification of our complicated world-wide problem.
Your many words about the "doubling" of world population is best described by the equation for the growth of compound interest. I would include it here, but the computer will not permit such mathematical notation. So you can find it in any elementary college algebra textbook. I taught it for years in my Population course. You might be interested to know that the entire world population is already in the second phase of the Demographic Transition which some Demographers have been predicting since the 1930s. The male sex drive is one part of the issue, as is the female sex drive, but sex drive alone is a gross and incorrect, typical biological-reductionist, explanation.
Ms. Ascher hit the mark.
We haven't tried a maximum wage on the rich yet, or small limits on campaign contributions yet. There really is not much regulation of unlimited greed in America?
Capitalism has become a catch all phrase, depending on one's ideological predisposition it means many things. But without the incentive to invest your time and energy, which inevitably translates as a medium of exchange, money, aka capitalism, we are reduced to the live of a medieval serf., and frankly the water and air were more fetid and putrid then.
One can use any mathematical formula one wishes, and invoke any ism or ist they wish, such as reductionist. Which is an incorrect use of a word, as ism or ist means adherence to an idea to the exclusion of all others. I don't hold such ideas, but in truth the human sex drive, is why we copulate, and what is the product of copulation? Babies, and babies grown up to be humans (obnoxious ones at that)
So tell Mr Dobbertin, what other cause is there for the geometric expansion of the world's population, besides copulation? Pathenogenesis? Maybe in the primodial past, after all at one time there were no genders, that is why men have nipples, and why the Y Chromosome is not really a Y but a truncated X, with one leg of the X snipped by some segments.
Rather than dispute me, Mr Dobbertin how about venturing your own explanations and ideas. Do so in your own words, please, not by referring me to a book.
Thank you.
Mr. Farrar, please believe me when I say there is not enough room here, nor do I have the time to venture my own explanations here. I am, like you, elderly. I currently have several projects in the works and time is not my friend. I hope to finish my writing before I die. If I do not, my daughter will undoubtedly finish for me. She attended Columbia on scholarship and graduated with honors. She is a lot smarter than I. She delivered her first child, got married, finished her doctorate in Law and passed the bar Exam, all in one Summer.
I do not have the time or energy to lay out my ideas in full here. And even if I did attempt it I do not think Mr. Hartmann and his many faithful followers would be happy about it. This is his blog not mine.
I understand Mr Dobbertin. I don't think a long drawn out explanation is needed, any ideas can be encapsulated in a paragraph.
My brief is against the anti capitalists. Capitalism is used like communism is used on the right, as a stand in for evil, or the devil.
This is simplistic thinking. You are in general correct, that the situation that exists, the environmental disaster, even the oppression is a consequence, of "regulated" capitalism.
The problem is that it really isn't regulated. there is the appearance of regulation. The ability to regulate has degenerated over time, thanks to regulatory capture and politics. And that problem exists because of money in politics, and that problem exists because of human nature.
The ideal is a self effacing, selfless, self sacrificing savior a Messiah in Hudaism, a Jesus in Christianity and a Mahdi in Islam.
I am not at all content with the status quo, or the alternatives that have been tried, and humans have tried every alternative possible. From the rule of wise men (elite) aka Republic, to Emperors and Kings, to strongmen regimes (authoritarian) even co ops of a sort)the USSR and the PRC were initially set up as a co op, rule by committee, but that didn't last long before a strongman appeared and took control.
Representative government, aka Democracy,is the best alternative tried so far, but the problem is how to keep it free of corruption.
A regulated market economy (not a free market economy) has elevated me,you and the common man and woman, to a standard of living that would have been envied by Kings of old. I am middle middle class, and live better than Henry VIII., as do our lower middle class. even the lower classes.
The alternative is to live the life of a pseudo slave, under the thumb and boot of a diktat or the uncertainty or insecurity of anarchy or as a human resource of the ruling class. much as in the day of kings, barons and dukes.
Which in truth is the way we appear to be headed, a ruling class without the titles,pomp and circumstance of the nobility of old.
The Tidewater Aristocracy, the planter class of Virginia and the Carolinas enjoined the revolution, not because of the monopoly accorded the East India Company, and the taxes levied or the restrictions on manufacture, but because they had envisioned that they would be the nobility, with all of the titles, pomp and circumstance.
However the common man, the merchant, the farmer, the tradesman,had no truck with the idea of replacing British overlords with home grown overlords, so to get them on board, they resulted to forming Committees of Public Safety, name chosen so as not to alarm the British overlords and whose purpose was to monitor and punish those with loyalst sympathies, that was not enough so they had the printing presses in Philadelphia (Ben Franklins and Rittenhouse) publish tracts like Common Sense and Rights of Man, which worked, all too well, as the common man was in no mood to accept a new ruling class, but ruling class they became anyway, instead of titles, nobles, guilded carriages,they erected palatial homes (plantations), out of sight of the people, up mile long tree lined driveways, feted, entertained and married within their class, while retaining political control, via elections, of the instrument of power, the government.
They called themselves the First Families of Virginia and 12 of our presidents have come from the FFV. These families and the merchant families in the north have produced the shakers and movers,presidents and politicians. families like the Randolph's in Virginia ( William Randolph Hearst), the Van derBilts, the Adams, the Roosevelts (Dutch for Rose field), 17th century settlers,old money, in New Amsterdam.
Interestingly the Presidents and Politicians of substance, like Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and Roosevelts seem to have presided in the interests of the nation, and thus the people, as a whole. Whereas those of mean origins, like Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton, not so much
Iwould like to include Grant as an exception, because of the 15th Amendment, but his first act as President was to authorize the redemption of Lincolns War Bonds for Gold, his second act was to sign legislation that demonitized silver which produce the Grant signed the Coinage Act of 1873, effectively ending the legal basis for bimetallism. The Coinage Act discontinued the standard silver dollar and established the gold dollar as the monetary standard; because the gold supply did not increase as quickly as the population, the result was deflation. Silverites, who wanted more money in circulation to raise the prices farmers received, denounced the move as the "Crime of 1873", claiming deflation made debts more burdensome for farmers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant
My point is that capitalism and democracy have been a mixed bag of good and evil.
The alternative is authoritarianism. Which as we have discovered in the 20th and 21st Century can arrive via the ballot box.
As regards Capitalism is is not a political ideology, but an economic idea and it exists and thrives in any political environment.The capital employed by the USSR was human labor and mental effort. The capital employed in the west is a medium of exchange produced, sans coercion and diktat,by human labor and mental effort.
For those inclined toward the ideal of an eqalitarian society, there is no such thing, never has been, never can be. There will always be a MFWIC claiming the major share of resources. and demanding obedience. Be the Kingdom be the family, a group a tribe or a nation.
Mr. Farrar, no argument from me here.
As a PS Reply Mr Dobbertin
Mssr Robert Reich on todays substack has an article https://robertreich.substack.com/p/vance-and-the-future-of-the-anti
The gist of which is: That’s the point. Thiel and Vance — along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement — believe that the only way true libertarians can win in America is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the American establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.
Yarvin comes as close as anyone to being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement. He has written that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.
In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful; they should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.
Does this form of government, Libertarian, have appeal?
BTW, that is exactly how the Joint Venture known as the London Company of Virginia was governed from 1607 to 1624, when the charter was revoked and Virginia made a royal colony.
Mr. Farrar, Yarvin is wrong and does not understand what power is. It most certainly is not held by an amalgam of universities and mainstream press. It is held by the military-industrial-financial complex. Let's be honest; without the military, there is no real power.
Yarvin is a type I have seen many times in my academic career. They attend college, find it to be somewhat liberal in its orientation, which most are. That is, colleges are places where one is encouraged to be open to new, varied ideas. For reasons of their own, these people do not fit in at college and believe that there is a kind of power there which is inimical to them.
Thanks for the Robert Reich article.
As for the major theme: I hope you are correct and what we need is more effective regulation of the capitalist system. FDR demonstrated that it is a possible solution.
I did not realize that 12 of our presidents came from the Virginia planter elite. It does seem odd that our presidents who were most effective at acting for the benefit of all of us were from the elite like Jefferson and the Roosevelts and Kennedy, if he had lived longer. [I will always believe that JFK was killed by the Pentagon, so they could get their war] while those who were the base servants of the rich were common folk like Nixon, Truman, Reagan, Cleveland, Clinton.
It is hard to know how to classify the Bushes in this regard. Were they base and evil or just incompetent? Baby Bush was possibly both. I think he bungled 911. I do not believe he was in on a clandestine, conspiratorial part of the plot. But I believe he knew something was coming and he almost welcomed it. All the intelligence agencies informed him that something big was in the pipeline; but he went on vacation in Florida.
I almost died laughing when you used the word "sex"...men need sex? What makes you think women do not want sex? We want it or need it?
Oh women need and want it, that is for sure, my sister started masturbating when she was 8 with a pillow.
But women raping men is rare, and men can't believe that a man can be raped by a woman, because he has to erect to penetrate, unless she straps on a dildo.
Rape is universally a crime by men on women, not vice versa. So the male sex drive is more powerful than the female.
I will state this, power is one hell of an aphrodisiac, for men and women, power floods the system with testosterone (progesterone in females), and sexual abuse is not a male only preoccupation.
I know a woman who was sexually abused (fingered) by her grandmother.
Well said, Annabel.
I used to think religious extremists with nuclear bombs, such as Iran, would end humanity. Now it seems man will do it without the need of nuclear disaster. The end of insects, birds, etc is the end of the food supply. Man’s extreme stupidity and shortsightedness will be the end of him. “Not with a bang but a whimper”.
Thanks for reminding me of T.S Eliot's "The Hollow Men."
Ms. Maloney. I never was good with poetry. Is The Hollow Men part of the Waste Land? I remember having a darned hard time with T.S. Eliot. The only references in it which I recognized were Shakespeare [a hobby of mine since I was an undergrad] and Ovid, obviously, as so much of Shakespeare's muse was Ovid.
It's a sequel. I just looked it up (lol). It's been 50 years since I studied T.S. Eliot. I do remember The Hollow Men, as it seemed to relate to the Vietnam War at the time.
Ms. Silven, this is a real possibility.
The corporate “system “ is against us making large inroads to mitigate more climate damage. Would I like to have a hybrid vehicle? Sure but I am trying not to have a car payment in my senior years. Public transportation is limited in areas where I live (SCAL mountains) and takes forever to get anywhere right now after wildfires damaged roads and traffic is funneled through one major highway. My family and I recently returned from evacuation from a wildfire that threatened our neighborhood and came close to wiping out our town. It’s currently threatening the next town over from us, a major resort town. Even though this fire was determined to be arson, the fact that California’s drought situation has made it extremely dangerous. We are all praying for winter, except oh wait! We might have a repeat of Snowmaggedon like we did in winter 2023 buried in 12 feet of snow. So it’s getting pretty difficult choosing where to live anymore- the valley with 110 degrees or desert with 115 degrees or mountains with wildfires and unpredictable winter storms. We are all at risk now and I can’t even imagine the horror of the hurricane effect on lives and property back east. So I do what I can recycling and try to pay attention to corporate excess but in some ways I feel helpless in the struggle for corporate control over our systems of finance, government and the complacency of so many fellow citizens.
Ms. Tankersley, I appreciate your dilemma and sympathize with you and your neighbors. I have former students and friends in the South East who are now in dire straights from Helene. I believe you are on the right track. Corporatism is the place to look for an explanation of the problem.
Two Facts: 1. 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are extinct.
2. Homo Sapiens is a species.
Also: Read up on the history of the passenger pigeon.
Oldsalt65, yes, the last passenger pigeons lived in the area around Traverse City, Michigan. They were snared and killed by the millions in immense nets which were strung up onto trees in the area. I have seen old photos from a century ago of the nets full of birds. The photos hang on the walls of a hospital in Petoskey, Michigan which is a short hop up the road from Traverse City. The extinction of a species has been turned into a form of Bourgeois art.
What you mean "we," Kemosabe?
All we can do is get leadership that acknowledges that and wants to do something about it. Only hope .
https://www.mobilize.us/ft6/
The politicians won't. That only leaves us, and it's a tall order. At some point we will have to rise up on a global scale. I have no idea how this will play out, and I have been thinking about it for a number of decades.
I may well be gone by the time the wheels really fall off. But just in case I am not--I am building a sort of urban haven in an inner city, the one that was most safe from the climate crash and still affordable. I am 68 now. We will see how it goes.
As to the politicians and leaders--some are aware and are doing all they can. But that is a limited set. The capitalist power has so thoroughly invaded the body politic that getting the parasite out will severely damage the host.
Do you notice the walls that well-meaning and well-informed leaders run up against when they try to effect real change?
And that is just in this country. Globally, the type of change we need is a virtually impossible within the current system.
We are faced with a dilemma Annabel. The anti capitalist, or Marxist ideal, is two class society, as in the old Communist countries, a ruling class and serfs.
Runaway unregulated capitalism leads to the Marxist ideal.
The reason we have prospered, the reason that you can sit at your computer in a comfortable home,on a comfortable chair, in a warmed house, with a full belly is because of regulated controlled capitalism.
Human nature, humans, tend towards excess, insatiable appetites for things, food and power.
The idea behind democracy is to hold in check the strive for power. To obtain power requires use of force or persuasion or both. Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, Jenghis Khan, the minions of Muhammad, used force to obtain power, and the basis of the force was persuasion and force. Start small and build large.
Mussolini, Hitler, Franco the Bolsheviks, Mao started with persuasion then when they had numbers used force.
Christianity started with persuasion, apostles proselytizing in the markets, then when it had enough numbers to be troublesome, emperor Constantine co opted the movement and then used force to bring it and the people to heel.
Judaism and Islam started as persuasion, then imposed by force.
Moses had is brother Aaron gather a band of cutthroats and cut the throats of half of he tribe at night, in their tents, because they rejected him and contiuned worshiping Ba'al.
Muhammad accumulated followers, in large part because he was a successful caravan raider, and after he died his successor spread out through the Mideast, subjugating the Christians, Jews, pagans and Zorastrians with the sword.
Capitalism is simply a tool, one of many, an ideology that is the means for power, and power is control over people and their minds.
Mr. Farrar, the structure of your entire argument here is petitio principii. It is logically a tautology.
Explain, please.
Ms. Maloney, I am not sure as to what you are asking. So, let me at least respond with this: petitio principii, means reasoning in a circle. A tautology is a thing defined in terms of itself; or, another kind of circularity. I may be a bit off the mark here. But I believe you may find both in Mr. Farrar's presentation.
Did I address what you were asking?
Yes indeed Mr. Solomon. My wife and I have been writing postcards for weeks. At this point we have hope.
We also need more ways to vote to facilitate solid action on Climate Change and other issues that are obstructed by Republicans and corporations:
EVERY state needs to have the power for Citizen Initiatives. Currently 24 states don't have this tool for citizen and grass roots action. ( https://ballotpedia.org/States_without_initiative_or_referendum ).
Hey North Carolina, that's you too! If your state and federal reps continue to not do anything about it, your citizens could begin to take this on. But you do not have the citizen initiative ability, and your Republican reps are not going to give it to you.
So, I think it is very worthy for Congress to pass a law to grant All States this power of Citizen Initiatives. Put some effective guardrails and rules on it to keep it from being exploited by big money and foreign actors.
Some states where citizens already have this power have approved initiatives to ban gerrymandering and redrawing districts by an independent commission, and even a few Red States are bringing back legal abortion after SCOTUS demolished Roe v. Wade. Consider that SCOTUS has taken their wrecking ball to Voting Rights, and so could a Republican Congress. Citizens in every state should have the right to secured, safe voting rights, and I believe the people in many states would be more likely to secure these rights for themselves than would their state and federal reps.
I'm certain conservatives and Republicans would scream "unconstitutional" at that, and at this:
While they are at it, or when it could pass, Congress should/could include clauses carefully designed to allow the citizens to approve Constitutional amendments where the prescribed "State Legislatures (especially with their gerrymandered, extremist hacks )" refuse to approve them. If designed effectively, citizen initiatives could supplant or command their legislature on Constitutional amendments. ... Something worth thinking about, IMHO, as we look further down the road at the removing Electoral College and renovating the Senate.
I posted this on my sub-stack some time ago. Right now we are performing our ghost dance and convincing ourselves that we can escape our predicament. We can't, it's too late unless we make drastic changes which we probably won't.
https://open.substack.com/pub/burstingthebubble/p/global-overshoot?r=7y1gx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Humans are at the top of the food chain---FOR NOW.
We can and will invent our way out of burning things to create the energy that keeps us alive and makes life worth living.
Ignorance and the belief that all this destruction is not our fault or the thought that it is some god's will has to be conquered.
If you have a conscience, what a horror to realize and watch what is being destroyed. It's lead, follow, or get out of the way. Can we afford conservatives or psychopaths running things? Hell no!
Vote like the planet depends on it, because it does.
Alis, Your reference to energy brings to my mind three things:
1) During our entire time on this planet human kind has always devised ways to produce more energy per capita than the previous generations. Never does this process work in the reverse direction. Never. We can thank Leslie White and Beth Dillingham when they were at the university of Michigan for pointing out this insight. I was lucky enough to study under Beth and her husband Harry Dillingham, two brilliant teachers. You can read in one sitting, White and Dillingham's short book: THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE, 1973, Burgess Publishing.
For thousands of years the natural movement of water and wind was harnessed in the form of water wheels and windmills. Also, the muscular strength of animals and Humans was used to move things.
For hundreds of years we used the attraction of molecules to combine in ways that released energy which we could put to use for our benefit. Burn wood, burn coal, burn petroleum, burn natural gas, etc. Newcomen and Watt figured out ways to combine levers and the wheel with this burning in such a way as to produce a great deal of useful energy: steam engines, external combustion engines.
A bevy of men all contributed to another form of energy based upon the attractive force of electrons and magnetic fields: electricity. Benjamin Franklin, Nicola Tesla, John Proteus Steinmetz, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse.
Rudolf diesel invented a machine which utilized the potential energy found in the molecular structure of petroleum: Internal combustion engines. Eventually this was modified to another form of internal combustion engine, the gasoline engine.
The modern water wheel which we call the turbine was connected to magnets and copper wires in such a way as to produce a movement of electrons in a wire over great distances. Thus permitting the use of energy to be utilized miles away from the source of the generator of the electricity. Steam power, diesel power, and gasoline power engines also are used to spin the generators which generate the movement of electrons that we call electricity. The best single volume for this topic is: SCIENCE FOR THE CITIZEN, by Lancelot T. Hogben, 1938, Alfred a Knopf.
Eventually mankind found a way to use the energy created by the decaying of matter through the transformation of the nucleus of the atom into another form of nucleus. This released immense amounts of energy undreamed of in previous civilizations.
2) I am describing here, how human kind has learned how to use the three forces in the universe to release energy for human benefit. There are only three forces in the universe.
A) The farthest reaching force is gravity. It can reach out hundreds of millions of light years from distant galaxies to other galaxies. Falling water releases this energy for humankind.
B) The force which attracts the electron to the nucleus of an atom is the middle distance-force. This is the force which combines atoms into molecules and creates magnetic fields of force when the electrons are accelerating on a massive scale. This force combines atoms to create molecules and also moves electrons to generate what we call electricity and magnetism. This is what high school chemistry is about.
C) The third force in the universe is the force which holds the subatomic particles together to form the nucleus of the atom. These are the shortest reaching forces. But they are extremely strong. When the particles in the nucleus of the atom shift their position, this releases immensely intense amounts of energy. The devices mankind has created to shift these particles are called atom bombs, nuclear reactors, cyclotrons, accelerators, etc. The sun is a huge nuclear fusion reactor which has been sending out energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation for 4.5 billion years. All of the energy mankind has used here on Earth has come from two sources. First: Earth's gravity. Or second: it originated in the electromagnetic radiation from the sun which we call light........., until in 1942, when Enrico Fermi released some of this nuclear energy at the University of Chicago. His energy came from uranium here on Earth, not the sun. This was the first time an appreciable amount was released in this fashion. It turned out to be far more than Fermi had expected. Fermi and everyone associated with his "pile" died eventually from radiation or complications from it.
All of this is to demonstrate Leslie White's claim that each generation produces more energy per capita than the pervious one.
3) We can see now that our quest, our irreversible drive to produce more and more humanly useful energy is probably going to cause us to go extinct. Either in a huge atomic blast or in a poisoned environment, if we are not extremely careful.
Please excuse me for this disquisition on energy and extinction. I am certain you follow my reasoning. But try to explain this to MAGATS who are still arguing about how many angels can stand on the head of a pin. Unless we stop this seemingly inexorable drift into hell, our children are doomed.
I have similar ideas about computers, digital information vs. analog information, the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) and life; not just human life, but life itself. These ideas are mostly my own. I did not borrow many of them from others. When I try to explain these ideas to biologists or religious people they get mad as hell at me because I deny both Deism and Darwinism.
Well Dear Dobbertin since I am agnostic on both, you certainly did not piss me off.
There is much truth in the phrase "it is not an exact science". Everything we have learned has been built layer by layer and along the way things had to be sorted and discarded. That tracks with how brains work.
Which leads me to a conclusion I came to after trying to reason with hard right-wing conservatives: their brains do not function like mine---it's absolutely not a matter of intelligence or education. It is about judgement, having a conscience, and being open-minded. Usual discussions with them are on the level of "How's your day going?".
Loved the science progression info. I like Iceland and their Geo-thermal ideas. There are ways to use what is under our feet. It's just further down in some areas, but as they say, we can get there from here. Wind, solar, water/waves, heat storage, choosing less or no children---it is happening.
In the human mind, nothing beats profit.
Whose human minds are you talking about? For some humans, "nothing beats profit," and they're the ones we don't want leading the country or big corporations, including finance and insurance. We are overdue for a major cultural and economic system change in the U.S. It needs to happen before it's too late.
I agree that we are overdue for a major overhaul, but then why are we overdue? Because giving up the comfortable status quo is always a hard sell. We are usually pushed into change by circumstances beyond our control, out of desperation (e.g. the Great Depression creating the impetus for the New Deal). Until the next collapse, people will do capitalism, no matter how soul-killing it is, because it is the proven way to survive. As Bruce says, "sadly true".
That is not true, Jeffrey. Capitalism is not THE proven way to survive, and I don't think we will survive over the long term under this economic system. We are cannibalizing ourselves as we seek to grow continuously in a finite ecosystem.
I agree with you, but you're mistaking what I'm saying. People typically think tactically, not strategically, including you and me. We are reluctant to give up what we have until it's clearly working against our survival, or until something else attainable is clearly better. Long term, we all live in an unsustainable existence under the present rules. We need to change the rules, but most people aren't suffering enough (or at all) yet to pay attention to our pleas.
What is your definition of capitalism?
Jeffry, see my posts on this thread about capitalism.
Capitalism is the reason that you have enough disposable income to sit there and type on a computer or cell phone, eat well enough to pontificate and not be scrabbling to survive.
Capitalism is not the problem, nor is the profit motive, the problem is lack of restraint, and in that regard we all are guilty.
The restraint on us is our access to the medium of exchange. The restraint on those with an excess of the medium of exchange is the law. The law which limits their excess and what they can do with that excess, and their response is to use the excess to buy the law, by buying the law makers and the enforcers.
The motto of Law Enforcement is "to serve and Protect" but that is truncated they serve and protect the ruling class, the 10%
Before it reorganized the USAF had Command based on function, like Air Transport command and Strategic Air Command (SAC(. Each command had a motto the motto of SAC was Peace us Our Profession. I knew one of the men who coined that motto,in response to a competition,it was "Maintaining the Peace is Our Profession. it was adjudged that the motto was too long, so they truncated it to Peace is Our Profession., thus To Serve and Protect the Overlords is reduced to Serve and Protect.
Jeffey: Profit is the motivation for getting out of bed in the morning. The primal motivation is to live, that means food, clothing, shelter, once you achieve that, then the motivation is to improve your physical situation and that means profit.
You have an income Jeffrey, therefore you invest your time and energy into producing something that will provide you a profit, that you have excess medium of exchange to procure those things that you need to survive, make you comfortable and happy.
Before food preservation methods, you only ate what you killed and the rest spoiled, if you had excess you could trade it to someone else who needed food.
What we know as commerce commenced in the fertile crescent with the advent of agriculture and the production of more grain than we could eat. People quickly realized that they could sell (barter) excess grain for products made by their neighbors, and thugs realized that if they could dominate the people with threats of violence, then they could force the people to hand over the excess grain to him where he could store and dispense it, and thus profit, and profit became the driving motion for a person to invest their time and muscle energy into producing a profit.
The pursuit of profit is the reason why we can sit here and self righteously pontificate.
What is needed is restraint, and people don't restrain themselves, restraint has to be imposed, and what has been happening is that restraints were imposed, but those who have felt restrained have been discomfited, and have come together, like in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or National Association of Manufacturers, or even Wall Street, and used the power that they have accumulated, by accumulating the medium of exchange, to use the body politic to remove those restraints,
And the culmination of that effort, is the rise of the corporate state, which Mussolini called fascists, and Lenin State Capitalism.
Mr. Farrar, You say "What we know as commerce commenced in the fertile crescent..." telling us that all of the economic activity in the world today ["the culmination of that activity is the rise of the corporate state"] sprang forth in a linear course from the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This is the usual faulty prehistorical and ancient historical account taught in economics courses of business colleges. This stuff is completely ignorant of the work of the three founders of modern social science in Europe: the Germans Karl Marx and Max Weber, and the Frenchman Emile Durkheim. Plus the work of an army of scholars who tread in their footsteps. Nor are purveyors of this false narrative aware of the work of the founders of American Cultural Anthropology: Franz Boas at Columbia and Leslie White at the University of Michigan. Plus the empirical work of thousands scholars who followed them. Furthermore, the more recent empirical work of Graeber and Wengrow throw out the whole narrative in their recent book: THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING. Look also in DEBT: THE FIRST 5000 YEARS by Graeber.
Cultural Anthropology is in the midst of an intellectual revolution, and old explanations are dying like flies. Our grandchildren's texts will be rewritten as their enquiring minds uncover new paradigms which have been clouded in the past.
Another answer to why might be our preoccupation with electronics, cell phones and even our appliances that now "communicate" wirelessly; being surrounded constantly by things that are destructive to our living world.
From the cellphonetaskforce.org:
What’s wrong with wireless technology?
By substituting radiation for wires, we are swimming in an ocean of artificial electromagnetic fields that are interfering with life itself. We are in effect electrocuting ourselves, our children, our pets, the insects, birds, animals, trees and plants around us and all of living creation. We are killing our planet.
My Indian squash had tons of blossoms this year, but not one single fruit. I finally figured out there are no pollinators.
The Essene Book of Revelation...the Revelation to John the Apostle....regarded by many as the most mystical of the biblical prophecies....John asks to be taken from his time, ahead of our time, and allowed to see our probable future...through graphic detail, John describes his vision of chaos, death, terror, and destruction, the magnitude of which had never been see before. He ask his angelic guide why these things are happening, and the angel replies. "Man has created these powers of destruction. He has wrought them from his own mind. He has turned his face away from the Angels (forces) of the Heavenly Father and the Earthly Mother, and he has fashioned his own destruction."
Upon witnessing this outcome, John's heart is "heavy with compassion." He ask. "Is there no hope?" The voice replies to John echoing a memory of the greatest possibilities for today and future generations. "There is always hope, O thou for whom heaven and earth were created..."
Suddenly the vision of death and destruction fades from view and he is shown another scenario, a second possibility. "But I saw not what befell them, my vision changed, and I saw a new heaven and a new Earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away...And I heard a great voice...saying, there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain."
As John's vision continues he sees a time when peace and cooperation envelop the nations of the world. During this time there is no longer a need for war...."Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore, for the former things are passed away.
Quotes from The Isaiah Effect by Gregg Braden pp. 74-75...Have a Good Day.
A beautiful sanity affirmation.
About 2 years ago I felt compelled to evacuate from the the Cedar Creek fire in eastern Lane County, Oregon. At the time I had and old cat and an old German shepherd. It was a mismanaged fire, though the report issued said otherwise.
Since that fire, I've subscribed to Wildfire Today. I do recommend that everyone interested in the future of our wild lands and those who fight those wildfires read this also. It's unimaginable what the fire fighters are enduring! Period! No amount of "raking" the forest will resolve the complex challenge.
I still have the old cat and old German shepherd and 2 new kittens that I found in parking lots. And I've decided that I'm not gonna evacuate again till I see the flames.
The USFS has to be funded, The NPS (Nat'l Park Service) has to be funded. This year, Oregon used the entirety of its wildfire funds. Over one million acres of Oregon burned! Eastern Oregon was decimated. And where I live, the AQI is around 150-200 today. Nonetheless, children in this small village are out on bikes and playing. For crying out loud! WTF?
There is one person who will support the USFS; that they don't get counterfeit supplies and have adequate wages: That States, e.g., Oregon, CA, WA, COL, WY, etc., get the support they need.
And did I mention Hurricane Hellene?
During the Cold War, presidential elections were kinda simple; foreign affairs are much easier than domestic affairs. This year, not so much. Nonetheless, the choice is simple, in my humble opinion. It really doesn't matter that the person is plaid, polkadot, s/he... One person, like Biden, FDR, RFK, LBJ, cares deeply about each individual and their rights, and one does not. One person speaks truth and one does not. One person can make a difference. That can be you with your vote.
Musk can go to Mars and take tRump with him. The rest of us need to save this planet. GOTV!!!
The planet has been begging for some time now at least 30-50 years. We just didn't notice the signs. We're so numb to it all we cannot even get out of our own way. The only way out now is a turn around world. We need to recoil, pull back radically from the growth model that greed has propelled many of us and even unknowingly. As industrialized creatures We're unable to tolerate even the slightest discomfort.
Thom it is coming soon to all, all of us. Simplicity, survival for the mere basics. My question is:
What the hell difference is it gonna make, even if Kamala becomes next president. Is there anyone here that thinks she wil face -off with the Demogogs of the Democratic machinery and say we are no longer going down this road of endless spiralling costs.